China's Baidu Reportedly Launching Its Own AI Service To Rival ChatGPT

The viral artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbot, ChatGPT, could soon have some competition.

Chinese search engine behemoth Baidu is launching its own ChatGPT-like service as early as March this year, according to Bloomberg. The service works the same as its Western counterpart, with it being able to answer queries in a conversational fashion.

For those unfamiliar, ChatGPT is a language model developed by San Francisco-based AI research group, OpenAI, and made available to the public in November last year. It is a conversational AI trained on large amounts of text data to generate human-like responses to different questions and prompts.

Baidu's chatbot is built on the company's Ernie natural language processor, which has been trained for years to understand and generate text. The company says the AI can even handle advanced tasks like machine reading comprehension, text classification and semantic similarity.

Reuters, citing a person familiar with the matter, claims Baidu wants to initially launch its chatbot as a standalone application, but plans to eventually merge it with its search engine. The goal of which is supposedly to enhance the search engine by having it deliver chatbot-generated results, instead of only links.

Microsoft is said to be doing the same as it collaborates with OpenAI to launch a version of Bing that leverages the capabilities of ChatGPT. The American software giant similarly wants the chatbot to answer queries rather than just show links. It hopes to make that version of its search engine available in March.

Baidu has reportedly been investing heavily in AI technologies like cloud services and autonomous driving in a bid to diversify its revenue sources. The move is likely to help compensate for the slowing growth of its search engine, which remains the largest and most widely used in China.

Baidu declined to comment on its new chatbot.

Chinese search engine behemoth Baidu is launching its own ChatGPT-like service as early as March this year.
Baidu wants to initially launch its chatbot as a standalone application, but plans to eventually merge it with its search engine.
The goal of which is supposedly to enhance the search engine by having it deliver chatbot-generated results, instead of only links.